By Jenna Somers
When parents need answers about their child's cognitive and emotional development or mental health, they may first ask the child's pediatrician or a specialist. The parents may find the help they seek, or the doctor might say something like, "The research isn't clear on that yet."
Scientific research, advanced by one generation of scholars, then the next, helps to answer these questions. That is why the U.S. government has, for decades, invested in research across every scientific field, building the foundation for real-world solutions. In the fields of educational neuroscience and mental health, the U.S. government is the largest global investor in and producer of research, leading to innovations that support people with learning disabilities and mental health challenges.
Scholars in the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University Peabody College represent some of the country's leading educational neuroscience and mental health researchers working on federally funded studies. They seek answers related to children's language development, literacy and learning, emotional development, and family mental health and well-being. Examining the importance of this research today offers a window into its potential impacts on children and families tomorrow.
Language, literacy, and learning
Predicting language delay
Children with language delay are at risk of experiencing academic and socio-emotional problems, and developmental language disorder can have negative consequences on reading and math achievement. Despite these outcomes, a behavioral or brain basis for predicting which children are at risk for developmental language disorder has not been determined.
To address this research gap, James Booth, Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Educational Neuroscience, is leading a five-year, $3.9 million grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders to study the brain function of language development in 4- to- 8-year-old late talkers with language delay. His team seeks to identify predictive biomarkers that could support early screening and treatment. They are examining two "streams" in the brain that support language processing for sound and word meaning as well as whether long-term development of skills for sound and word meaning is bidirectional, and whether there are age differences in directional effects between the streams.
Booth says this is the first study to longitudinally examine the brain basis of preschool language development in typically developing children and late talkers. Findings could have important implications for identifying language delay, knowing when to intervene, and whether treatment strategies should focus on sound-based or meaning-based brain mechanisms at certain time points.
As Booth makes clear, it is difficult to develop interventions or treatments for children who may face myriad challenges associated with learning and development without first understanding what's happening in the brain and why.
"For knowledge to be truly generative, you need to understand the underlying brain mechanisms involved. If you understand the mechanism, then you can apply it to different populations. You can understand why an intervention works, not just that you know it works," Booth said.
Supporting reading skills of hearing-impaired children
One of Booth's almost completed studies demonstrates the importance of understanding brain function to support the reading skills of deaf and hard of hearing children. He says millions of children have hearing loss and tend to have below-average reading skills. Only about 10 percent of these children attain age-appropriate reading levels by high school graduation.
"Deafness per se is not the cause of low reading skill," Booth said. "If we understand how reading works in children who are deaf and hard of hearing, then we are better positioned to help them in learning to read."
This study, which is supported by a $3.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, offers the first comprehensive brain-based model of the reading process in individuals with hearing loss, and it is the first to demonstrate that locations in the brain involved in processing speech reading-otherwise known as lip reading-are also involved in word reading. The ability to identify speech components from facial cues contributes to phonological awareness, which is necessary for learning to read. These findings, which are discussed in a forthcoming paper, suggest that training children with hearing loss in speech reading could strengthen their reading skills.
The process of letter and number learning
Neuroimaging research could also reveal how the brain changes during first grade, a foundational year of learning that sets the stage for reading and math outcomes in later elementary school years. Understanding how the brain changes throughout foundational learning periods could improve learning interventions and advance the development of artificial intelligence.
That is why Sophia Vinci-Booher, assistant professor of psychology and human development, is leading a multi-institutional team evaluating how brain responses for letters and numbers emerge and develop throughout the first grade. She is supported by a three-year, $1.6 million grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
To capture how the brain changes during foundational learning, Vinci-Booher developed dense longitudinal neuroimaging, a novel approach of monthly MRI measurements of brain activity throughout the first year of schooling. She discusses this new approach in her forthcoming paper currently under review. "Developmental scientists often focus on process. We want to capture the ups and downs - the waxing and waning - of how behaviors progress over time. Understanding process in the brain leads to effective interventions, not only because we know more about how the brain should change over time, but also because we can identify timepoints at which the brain is likely to be most sensitive to intervention," Vinci-Booher said.
As part of this study, Vinci-Booher and her team developed a corpus of 35,000 Sesame Street Images to derive first graders' brain responses associated with letters and numbers embedded in educational-oriented scenes. They collaborated with the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries' Digital Lab to create the Sesame Street Archive, an open-access searchable database of the images for reuse by the scientific community. She will present the Sesame Street Archive project at the Conference of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Nashville this June.
The Sesame Street Archive is the first large-scale image dataset that will allow AI to train on visual scenes of typical child educational materials. This AI training is likely to replicate human learning more authentically than current training procedures that use only adult data. Additionally, AI training could use the Sesame Street MRI Dataset to incorporate experimentally measured brain responses to further enhance understanding of human learning.
Nurturing scientific literacy
Just as researchers know little about brain changes during foundational learning, they know little about the origins and development of scientific literacy and interests that emerge in early childhood. According to Amy Booth, professor of psychology and human development, expanding knowledge of early scientific understanding could support children's long-term STEM participation and achievement. That has been the focus of her Science Sprouts project, which has received support from two separate National Science Foundation grants-a current and completed one-totaling $3.3 million.
Booth is evaluating children's home experiences, their awareness of and responsiveness to cause and effect, and the development of related cognitive skills from ages 3 to 13 to understand the relationships between children's cause and effect knowledge, scientific literacy, and interest in science.
"From the preliminary data, we see that the way parents talk to their children at a very young age-engaging them in critical thinking about cause and effect in the world, encouraging them to hypothesize about why something happened-is related to scientific literacy later in childhood," Booth said.
"But also, the amount of science stuff in the house seems to matter. Do you have science kits, books on science topics, science-themed video games and TV programs? Do you engage your kids in scientific experimentation or observation? Are they visiting zoos, museums, and aquariums?"
Booth says that this information, even from children as young as 3 years old, seems predictive of scientific literacy at 11 years old. Children's attitudes toward science decline in middle school when they engage in more demanding science instruction. By extending the study through middle-school years, Booth and her team will be able to trace relations between early attitudes toward and later achievements in science.
Bridging cognitive science and math education
Understanding children's mathematics development is also important. "Patterning lens," the ability to look for and use predictable patterns in math learning, is a focus of Bethany Rittle-Johnson's work. She has significantly influenced the field of learning and instruction in early mathematics as the Antonio M. and Anita S. Gotto Professor of Child Development.
In a multi-institutional study, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation's Education Core Research Program, Rittle-Johnson is applying the concept of patterning lens to test whether a modified board game layout can help teach foundational math concepts of place value and two-digit number calculations to children ages 5 to 7. Both concepts are essential building blocks for proficiency in more advanced math.
"Number board games are a fun, interactive way to help children learn about numbers. We think small changes to current number board games could help children learn even more from game play," Rittle-Johnson said.
Traditional number board games, such as Snakes and Ladders, organize numbers linearly, snaking back and forth as a player proceeds up the board. This layout may miss opportunities to teach students the underlying structure and patterns inherent in the base-10 number system.
A modification of the linear board game style could support children's number knowledge. The research team has created a 0 to 100 numerical board game that organizes numbers in a 10 by 10 grid with numbers ascending from left to right. Numbers ending in the same ones digit align vertically, like in a hundreds chart. Visual cues, such as the ones digit repeating in each decade, highlight numeric patterns.
Researchers will assess learning outcomes with student participants playing each board game. The study design will help to refine the theory about how a patterning lens promotes early numeracy learning and offer insight into the process of numeracy development over the course of the game-playing sessions.
Family mental health and well-being
Difficulties with learning and cognitive and emotional development can lead children to experience negative mental health outcomes, like anxiety and depression. However, before children enter school, their family, home life, and mother's mental health, from even before they are born, also play significant roles in their mental health and development.
Pregnancy and mental health
Pregnant women may report feelings of brain fog, forgetfulness, and fluctuations in moods, among other brain-related phenomena throughout pregnancy and the postnatal period. These symptoms do not have clear explanations of what is happening in the brain, but recent studies by Kathryn Humphreys and Autumn Kujawa, associate professors of psychology and human development, may offer insight by examining the effects of pregnancy on mental health during the prenatal and postpartum periods.
They are collaborating on a $3.9 million NIH-funded study, led by Humphreys, exploring changes to brain structure and function during pregnancy and the potential effects of those changes on mental health throughout the peripartum period, the time during pregnancy and after giving birth, when significant biological changes and high rates of depression occur. The study seeks to characterize brain changes throughout the full 40 weeks of pregnancy.
The grant expands the work of a smaller study led by first-author Yanbin Niu, a doctoral student in developmental sciences working in Humphreys' lab. Niu's team found significant reductions in estimated brain volume during pregnancy, primarily in the volume of gray matter in the prefrontal cortex. These changes to brain structure are associated with hormonal changes and may help explain potential mental health consequences like peripartum depression.
In a related study, funded by a $3.6 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, Kujawa seeks to understand whether changes in the brain and behaviors during pregnancy could predict postpartum depression. This information could support timely and targeted treatments for pregnant people at high-risk for depression, allowing practitioners to address symptoms before they develop. Postpartum depression can have profound negative effects on mothers, their children, and the mother-child relationship, creating an urgent need to better understand risk and inform prevention efforts.
"If we can better understand some of these mechanisms of peripartum depression, we might be able to adapt interventions we are developing in a separate study with mothers and older children for pregnant and postpartum people to focus on increasing positive emotions, particularly in the context of caregiving and establishing a relationship with a new baby," Kujawa said.
"We're also interested in the timing for predicting risk-how early in pregnancy can we observe markers of risk for later symptoms? That could help to determine when to administer assessments and intervene."
In line with the idea of mental health interventions during pregnancy, in a study published last year, Kujawa, Humphreys, and others, found that mindfulness tendencies before childbirth may support early feelings of bonding over time, which is critical to the mental health of mothers and infants.
Familial patterns in psychological well-being
Research suggests that children of parents with depression are two to three times more likely to develop anxiety and depressive disorders than children whose parents never experience depression. Moreover, these effects are stronger on average for depression in mothers compared to fathers.
In a study supported by a $3.8 million NIMH grant, Kujawa and Katie Burkhouse, associate professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University, are investigating the link between maternal and child depression by examining how positive emotions in the brain change for young children of parents with and without depression. The researchers are testing risk and protective factors for trajectories of emotional development and mental health. Results from the study could inform potential prevention programs for mothers with depression and their children.
Beyond parental depression, the caregiving environment significantly shapes brain development during infancy and toddlerhood, but how does it affect risk for emotional and behavioral problems later in development? And could information gathered from this early developmental period help predict later difficulties?
Humphreys' study on parent-child proximity and emerging psychopathology explores these questions, supported by a $3.7 million grant from the NIMH Biobehavioral Research Awards for Innovative New Scientists program. Children in the study wear a Tot Tag, an unobtrusive device to measure their physical proximity to caregivers. The research team is examining children's exposure to language, caregiver sensitivity, and neuroimaging data.
Humphreys aims to improve assessments of the early caregiving environment; identify when to intervene if brain characteristics suggest later mental health challenges-in other words, when in development are caregiving interactions most influential; and develop effective preventative interventions that target aspects of the caregiving environment, such as sensitive caregiving, physical closeness, and language exposure, that are most linked to later child functioning.
"This project is the culmination of disparate lines of research, allowing for an innovative approach to assessing how variations in early experiences may be shaping brain development and subsequent behavior," Humphreys said. "Insights from this study could inform strategies to promote resilience and improve child outcomes."
From research to doctors' offices and classrooms
A parent visits their child's pediatrician to discuss a potential developmental delay. Another parent discusses learning challenges with their child's teacher. A pregnant woman shares with her doctor that she is often sad and forgetful and asks what she can do to stop feeling this way. New parents ask how their family can support their baby's social and emotional development.
When people meet with doctors, teachers, and other practitioners, they want answers that will help them care for their children and families. What they may not consider is how much of a practitioner's response may be informed by federally funded research studies like those underway by scholars at Peabody College. Their work underscores the importance of investing in scholarship that advances effective educational and mental health practices. By continuing to support research on the development of foundational academic skills, early scientific literacy, and the neurobiological underpinnings of mental health conditions, the federal government plays a critical role in helping children and families to thrive.
This article includes content originally published on August 31, 2023, September 4, 2019, November 13, 2023, October 5, 2023, February 17, 2025, August 28, 2024, January 30, 2024, December 3, 2024,and July 28, 2022.
